That begins me thinking: where is "home" exactly? There are a great many ideas about home. It's where the heart is, right? Or is it where the heart was? Is it where our memories lie? Or is it where our families gather? Where is my home?
I think for many people, home is a specific building where one grew up and lived until one set off on adult life adventures. I know this is true for my father. That home he moved to as a child is still occupied by my 90-year-old Grandmother. The small town once inhabited by workers in the local mine has changed little over the decades, and when he would go back, my father still was called by his high school nick-name. Clearly this is his home, and it's no surprise to me that in the autumn of his life, he has returned home to live. He is comfortable there, he is known there. His home is truly there.
But I don't have a home like that. My childhood home was sold a while ago and is now occupied by strangers. I have no family there anymore and I wonder if I would still be known in the small town I grew up in. Even if I was known, where would I go to visit? Who would welcome me? Where is my home?
My husband's parents moved frequently and left his primary "home" around the time he graduated from college. Is he, like me, without a home? No, not quite. While his parents moved, they went together to a new home and have made it so much their own it has a home like element. It is the place family can gather and celebrate holidays and enjoy the company of one another. It is one of many places my husband and his family are at home. For them, it is the gathering of family and the celebrations together that make a home.
I don't have a home like that either. My parents divorced about the time I went away to college. There is no happy gathering place. My father's hometown is completely foreign to me. His family ways are not the ways I am accustomed to. We never spent a holiday with them. I don't know the people, I don't recognize the traditions. Likewise, my mother's family rarely gathered for anything but weddings or funerals. My mother was the daughter of a forest ranger and lived all over the Midwest. And while that culture is somewhat more familiar to me, it does not provide a frame of reference. I think, in fact, that my mother spent her adult life trying to escape home and the traditions and history of her family. My family does not gather. My family does not have holidays together.
As Thanksgiving approaches, the ultimate family holiday, I find myself longing for a home. Of course we have a lovely house with darling children laughing and playing. But what I want is that greater home that tells of my history and traditions. I find myself wondering where that could be. Is it on an Island I left 8 years ago, inhabited by strangers? Is it shattered in so many pieces like the marriage my parents could not repair? Do I have a home?
I find myself feeling homeless, but then thinking that is unfair to people who truly are homeless, but it is not unlike the feeling of being an orphan I had after my parents' divorce. I want so badly to have that home to connect to, and realize it doesn't exist. It makes me wonder if there isn't something terribly wrong with our culture. Maybe people aren't meant to uproot and move around all over the place without extended families. Maybe we need to stay where we are from or at least with our people.
Maybe we humans are really tribal beings deep inside. I've always marveled at cultures that had long oral histories, people who carried their stories with them where ever they went, passed down for centuries. I always longed for that sense of who I was, from whence I came. Without a place called home, I had no people I was connected to. Family members were relative strangers, their stories had no meanings because I did not know the places or people they spoke of, besides the stories were rarely told since we rarely gathered.
Whatever is at the root of my feeling without a home, I know that this time of year particularly brings it on. I didn't feel this way in the perpetual summer of the subtropical climate we just left behind. There's something about the smell of smoke coming from chimneys and the cold weather that makes me think of baking that also turns my mind and my heart to that place and family that simply do not exist. It happens every fall, I am just now realizing. It's this kind of homesick sadness that comes over me and never quite resolves until the holidays have past and spring is upon us. Where do I come from? What is my history? What are my traditions? Who are my people? Where is home?
Dorothy said "there's no place like home" I'm sure she was right, I just hope that one day I will discover mine.
